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All Employee Email 1 - Monday, March 15, 2021 at 10:04 AM

CSU Employees,

This email is primarily intended for employees with a CSU phone extension, access to one, or to those we forward calls onto their cell phone. If you are in this group, please review this email since all will need to start using the Vonage calling system.

As we transition, the IT department is working to get you prepared for the new service. That includes keeping you informed about the cutover, creating Vonage logins, deploying soft phones and desk phones, and providing access to Vonage’s web based training, and our developing guides.

 

CUTOVER REQUESTED

We have requested that Vonage begin the process to port the current CSU employee desk phone numbers and the 800#’s from our current provider to them. At the moment we have request 3/31/2021 as our cutover date. From current experience it will occur around noon. This should give us the time needed to deploy the remaining phones, complete needed training, and complete most setups.

 

VONAGE LOGINS

By now ever employee with a dedicated CSU phone line should have received an email from Vonage to setup their account. As of today all employees have accessed their Vonage accounts. Thank you for getting these accounts setup. As a reminder without these accounts you will not be able to fully use your new phone. Voice mail, greetings, mobile & computer access, dept faxing, and other future features (e.g. personal faxing) are all accessed via the Vonage login.  

As a reminder the usernames are Case Sensitive. Normally, I would say usernames are not case sensitive, but with this system they are. Sorry about that. So pay attention to your login. Some are Title Case others are lower case and some are mixed Case. I am working with Vonage to set these to all lower case, but as it is a manual process it will take some time.

If you believe you should have received a Vonage login and have not, please click this link to email the helpdesk. The To and Subject fields have been completed for you. Please add in the body of the email the extension number you already have. If you do not have or know the 4 digit extension, just let me know.

 

DESK PHONES

As of Thursday last week our IT Student Workers began deploying the new Desk Phones. Our goal is to deploy 10-15 a day. This should give us plenty of time to give everyone a phone before the cutover. While we are transitioning to Vonage you will need both phones. When an IT worker appears in your office to deploy your new phone, please allow them the 5-10 minutes it will take to set it up. This will help us stay on schedule to deploy the phones ahead of the actual cutover date.

Why two phones? This will give you a functioning phone before the cutover, the new phone ready to go when we cutover, and the ability for IT to identify phones with more than one line appearances so we can manually migrate them. While you have two phones, the Vonage phones should work to call other Vonage CSU users, but may not work for external calling. We are setting these new phones up as a secondary phone on your desk connected via your CISCO phones network PC port. Please try them out. Call a coworker’s Vonage extension and test out their greetings. If you have any issues calling other Vonage phones by dialing the 4 digit extension, please click this link to send a support ticket in.

 

TRAINING RESOURCES

Vonage offers a number of different training options for you to choose from. They have interactive webinars you can schedule to attend, recordings to view as needed, and online guides for reading.  Please be sure you take the time to complete one of the Vonage video training options. Most employees will only need to watch two videos to complete the needed training to operate the new phones. We have put together a site to assist in this training. From it you can find the Vonage training and other resources we are creating. Please start at the Training Check Sheet and complete each step.

Training Check Sheet - https://clarkssummitu.atlassian.net/wiki/x/BwCGe

General Overview of all Training Resources - https://clarkssummitu.atlassian.net/wiki/x/AYB1e

Thank you for your feedback and patience during this transition. Once this is all complete CSU will be better placed to serve our students, alumni, and each other no matter where we are; from campus to our homes, on the go, or Aruba 😊. Wherever we have internet or cellular service CSU will be able to “reach out and touch someone” via a phone call. For a flash back on the “good old days” of land lines here is a commercial some of you may recall, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OapWdclVqEY .

 

Godspeed,

Wesley